Anthony Vance

After a large file transfer using the UNIX command SCP failed at around 90% for the third time, I finally had the sense to google how to resume an SCP file transfer.

It turns out that you can’t. But you can tunnel RSYNC over SSH which works like a charm. This tip is posted in numerous places online, but my SSH setup at home is slightly different, so I have to modify the SSH option as follows:

rsync --human-readable --partial --progress --rsh="ssh -l username -p 2012"
domain.name:/path/to/file .

This just points out again how great a program SSH is. Its uses are truly multitudinous. It’s like the swiss army knife of UNIX commands.

I successfully defended my dissertation for my Université Paris–Dauphine PhD. In September, I completed my PhD at GSU. I scheduled the defense to coincide wih the ICIS conference, which starts next week.

Before moving west to BYU, my family will move east—and north—to Oulu, Finland, where we will live for six months (January—July). I’ll be working as a visiting research professor in the IS Security Center at the University of Oulu, researching with my coauthor and center director, Mikko Siponen.

Among other things, we’ll investigate whether we can devise a theoretically-based and empirically-supported security maturity model, similar to the Capability Maturity Model of software engineering.

I read a nice article on the latest version of the programming language Python, which was updated to 3.0 (aka Python 3000) last week. Because this version is intentionally backwards incompatible, I’ve seen some negative reaction to it (see “Python 3.0: What’s the point?”). However, this article makes a good argument for the changes to Python, which, although relatively minor individually, add to make a substantial benefit for Python programmers.

Python is my current programming language of choice, and I’m going to code in Python 3.0 from now on. For me, the better handling of Unicode is enough of a reason to make the jump.